a house into a home
by Scarlet Secret
Summary: Constance and Moira, written for a tumblr prompt!


A/N: For a prompt on tumblr by Sydney for some Moira/Constance.

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Constance didn't even bother to close the door behind her during the times the house lay empty and dormant and Moira couldn't stand the disregard for the ebb and flow of the house. The backdoor should be closed because when it was open it make them all look terribly common and made her feel like this place really was bricks and mortar and not the home she saw time and time again, in a dozen different guises per decade, each as gaudy and against her tastes as the last. It surprises her that Constance can be so flip, this was her home once after all, and she doubts whether the other woman could ever look upon it as a mere _house_. Not after everything it had been to her, not considering what it still held within its wall.

Memories of laughter, of happier days, of a husband, a lifestyle she'd relished, children…

"He won't talk to you."

Constance turns unsteady eyes upon her and Moira knows she's drunk. Honestly, if she could count the amount of times she'd seen the other woman drunk in her life she'd have enough money to keep her mother like a Queen rather than the depressing situation she's forced to leave her own flesh and blood languishing in, purely because of the blue-eyed bitch staring at her with narrowed eyes. It makes her look ugly, not the booze, that's such a part of Constance Langdon that it can't make her look anything that it hasn't made her look before, but the squinting eyes show up her crow's feet and make her already thin lips purse into something altogether more pinched.

"What'd'you know you slut?"

Moira closed her eyes and took a short controlled breath. It wasn't as though she wasn't used to this by now.

"I know that Tate won't see you."

Above them – it could have been one floor, or it could have been two, hell, it could have been the basement given the way this house was – there was a thud and a smash and Moira sighed at the thought of the cleaning. It would be her doing it, it always was, and when she dropped the last shard into the trash can she knew she would allow herself those few seconds of dreaming what it would have been like to live in a house by herself. Somewhere that didn't bump in the night or have monstrous children lurking at top and bottom, or a psychopathic teenager forever knee-deep in his cloying, unchanging pubescent emotions, or poor Mrs Montgomery who she'd seen when she was alive and well and assumed was a portrait buried deep in the basement, with eyes that shone from some unknown source. If she'd ran then, she might have that home, nothing fancy, certainly she would never have chosen _this _house to live in by herself. No, something small and homey, with a hatch between the kitchen and sitting room, and flowers everywhere, with a second bedroom that she could look after her mother properly in and neighbours, oh what she wouldn't give for real, normal, kind neighbours, who came around to borrow sugar and not-

"You always were a cunt y'know?"

Moira sighed again.

"There's no need to take it out on me."

"There's every need!"

Constance took a step, an unsteady one Moira could tell, but still she didn't stumble. Her feet were used to this dance after all, she'd have been more likely to stumble sober.

"You think I don't know what you do when you're alone with him?"

Moira could smell the whiskey on her breath as she got closer but she didn't flinch. What would be the point if all Constance could do was breath on her? She could hear in the other woman's tones the sick things that swirled in her mind and Moira set her jaw at the very thought – it was _unthinkable_ for her, but not for Constance Langdon it seemed.

"You're mistaken," she swept away with all the grace she could muster, returning to her spot at the kitchen counter. That godawful Marcy woman would be coming back soon with new prospective tenants and she'd asked the live-in housekeeper to make sure the house smelt like a home so Moira had spent the best part of the day baking bread she'd never liked and spritzing the curtains to rid them of the musk. She felt safer in tasks and safer behind her kitchen counter.

"And you're a _whore_."

Constance's long thin fingers were stronger than they looked, as she learnt to her cost when they'd squeezed the gun with no visible effort, but even now, so many decades later and wrinkled as her own were, they were still strong enough to grasp hold of her fresh bread and crush it's shape. Moira watched her placidly: it was the smell she'd wanted anyway so it didn't matter. Constance didn't know that of course but Moira would much rather she attacked bread than her.

"If I am it's due to your husband."

Constance growled and scrunched the bread between her fingers, ignoring the heat with ease given the general numbness of her extremities, and picking the hunk up to hurl at the redhead, hitting the sake of her face with deadly accuracy. She barked with laughter at what she had done and leant on the counter as her mirth overtook her mercilessly.

Moira breathed out two or three – she wasn't sure and certainly wasn't counting – dry heaves as she regulated her powerful sense of indignation. Constance's aim was not coincidental and she reached up to swipe a few crumbs from the ruin of what had been a perfectly good eye with as much composure as she could muster.

"When you're quite finished."

The laughter stopped but Constance's shaking shoulders didn't. One hand gripped the table until her knuckled were white but the other came up to wave in a gesture of casualness that belied the colour she was turning.

"I don't feel so good."

Moira watched her flail for a few moments with satisfaction. She should leave her here to throw up her drink and fall down in her own sweat and drool but some instinct in her could feel Tate's eyes on her neck and she knew he was watching. He won't _do_ anything of course, because even if he wasn't a teenager and a murderer, he's still a man and the only think Moira ever learnt in her life was that it wasn't worth relying on men for a single thing, but she can't in all good conscience let him see his mother like this.

Closing her eyes against her own sense of annoyance Moira reached out and gently placed a comforting hand on Constance's shoulder and, much to her surprise, received nothing more than a mild moan for her trouble. She edged closer, forcing herself to believe it was for the sake of Tate and her sparklingly clean floor that she was helping this woman, she took Constance's arm in her free hand to help the other woman back into an upright position.

"You need to get to bed."

Constance, by some force that Moira thought must be more otherworldly than any of them were, managed to raise her head, her jaw still set and her lips still tight, as if to prevent any sickness, but her eyes were as sharp as ever and flashed from the point where flesh touched flesh and intended to help, up to the scar she had given her maid years before.

"What're you gonna do?" She wavered only minutely and extracted her arm, not quickly as though burned, nor slowly as though trapped, but deliberately, as though she had been soiled and didn't want to make it worse and Moira's hands fell to her sides with the same shame she'd felt in the split second Constance had caught her with Hugo Langdon but before the wicked old witch had put a bullet in her head. "Walk me home?"

"I can walk you to the door."

Constance rolled her eyes and moved to the door, grabbing where it still rested against the wall, not having been closed and rasping out a sharp "Don't bother" before she was gone.

Moira closed the door after her.

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A/N: Please be kind, this is the first time I've written them and I really did make an effort not to put English-isms in!


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